Tom started a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge in 2016, along with a visiting adjunct professor position at The Wuhan University of Technology. He also holds a visiting scientist position at CSIRO Melbourne. In 2017/2018, Tom is also Director of Studies for Materials Science, at Trinity Hall, Cambridge University. He has been fortunate enough to receive the EPSRC post-doctoral prize (2012) and the Panalytical award for an outstanding contribution to X-ray diffraction (2013).

You recently spent a month in Kyoto, Japan visiting the group of Professor Satoshi Horike and Professor Susumu Kitagawa on a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) short term post-doctoral fellowship. What motivated you to consider making this journey?

The research of my group is focused on metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), which are sponge-like compounds formed by networks of inorganic ‘bricks’ linked organic ligands. However, we place an emphasis on the amorphous, or non-crystalline state, and specifically MOF-liquids and melt quenched glasses. The latter is the first new family of glass-formers discovered since the 1970s, and has been gathering much attention.

The group based in the Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (ICeMS) is world renowned for excellence in the field of coordination polymers, and are also interested in the glassy and liquid states of hybrid polymeric systems. I’ve met both Satoshi and Susumu on multiple occasions at conferences, and we share the same desire to broaden the field and investigate the non-crystalline domain. We made a conscious decision to take the time to set up a lasting collaborative relationship between our two groups, given our common research interests. This was made easier by the fact we get along extremely well and we can be open about our research with one another!

How did you go about applying for the JSPS fellowship? Do you have any tips for others who might be thinking of applying as well?

The application form is short and easy to fill out – and the JSPS office in London is extremely helpful. There are several deadlines per year, and your Japanese proposed host institution will guide you through the process if unsure. I’d strongly encourage anyone interested in a stay with a Japanese Institution to get in touch with a local contact and discuss the possibilities.

What was the focus of the research that you carried out in Japan?

We focused on the links between coordination polymers and MOFs in the non-crystalline domain, and carried out some experiments aimed at understanding the chemical opportunities and variability in the area. We also have set up our two groups to work together experimentally, and samples should start to be exchanged soon!

Do you have any exciting results or collaborations planned in the future as a result? Are there any publications we should keep an eye out for?

We do! Aside from some promising early experimental results which are being followed up upon now, we hope to be able to provide our thoughts on how the non-crystalline coordination polymer and metal-organic field will develop in the long run. We’ve had some excellent advice on how to do this along the way, which will hopefully make it an enjoyable read when it comes together!

What impact do you think this experience will have on you and your research in the future?

The Royal Society University Research Fellowship that I am extremely fortunate to have, offers me freedom to explore the real edges and interfaces of science as it evolves, and there is no doubt that the exchange will benefit both our research groups – be it through student exchanges or sharing our different experimental capabilities.

Personally, the experience was invaluable. I am busy building up my group as a Royal Society University Research Fellow, and it’s really valuable to be able to learn from Satoshi, who is further on in his career. Long term planning, strategy and research environment is particularly important.

What were the best and most challenging aspects of your month away?

Well, the research first and foremost! Aside from that, Kyoto is simply a stunning city, and a bike is absolutely the best way to get around it. Waking up with sunrise at 6am and cycling around beautiful gardens, temples and cobbled lanes gives you a real taste of peace and quiet before the day really gets going! One of my hobbies is travelling – seeing beautiful sights, learning about different cultures, meeting new people and (especially) eating wonderful cuisines. In all cases, Kyoto was perfect.

As always when you are away from home, the occasional loneliness could have been an issue – you always want to share the best experiences with somebody. This was never an issue in Kyoto. Alongside my hosts, I’m particularly grateful to Prof. Shuhei Furukawa, Dr. Sanjog Nagarkar, Dr. Jet Lee, Dr. Gavin Craig and Ms. Azuma for making me feel so welcome!

My partner, Helena, also joined me for a week in the middle of the stay, and we took the opportunity to visit the mountainous Hida region.

Are you attending any conferences or events next year where our readers might meet you?

I will be at EuroMOF 2017 in Delft in late October, and then giving an inorganic seminar in Berkeley with Prof. Omar Yaghi in January 2017. Beyond that, I’m part of the organising team for the Annual UK MOF Symposium, which will be held at the University of Southampton on the 9th and 10th April 2018. I will be back in Japan for the ICCC 2018 in Sendai, early August, and then in New Zealand for the biannual MOF conference in December 2018.

I’ve recently gotten into Twitter, so follow me @thomasdbennett for a rough idea of my whereabouts!

And finally, what is the one piece of career-related advice that you wish you’d received as an early-career scientist?

A new idea and a novel area always help, although it’s easy for me to say now! I think that as long as you look after your students, appreciate the value of your collaborators, stay grounded and keep a smile on your face, then you will be able to remain grateful for what is a fantastic career.

Sarit received his Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from the University of Calcutta, in 2003 and then his Master’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 2005. Sarit went on to receive his PhD from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst under the supervision of Professor Vincent M. Rotello. Since his PhD, he has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at both the Massachusetts General hospital-Harvard Medical School and the Wyss Institute at Harvard University working with Professor Ralph Weissleder and Professor Peng Yin, respectively. Sarit has now returned to India and is working as a Faculty fellow at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research. His lab is interested in engineering small molecules and programmable molecular materials to address challenges in bioimaging, specifically in super-resolution microscopy. Some of his previously published work in Royal Society of Chemistry journals is below.

Athina received her Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She then undertook a PhD in Polymer Chemistry at the University of Warwick under the supervision of Professor David Haddleton. Athina is currently a Monash-Warwick Alliance Research Fellow in the research groups of Professor David Haddleton and Professor Thomas Davis, focusing on controlled living radical polymerization methods, mechanistic studies, photochemistry and sequence-controlled polymers. Some of her recently published work in Royal Society of Chemistry journals is below.

Anna is the Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering and the Robert von der Luft Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. She received her B.A. in physics at Bryn Mawr College and her Ph.D. in Materials Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After postdoctoral work in the Polymer Science Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, she joined the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh in 1987. Her research involves developing theoretical and computational models to capture the behavior of polymeric materials, nanocomposites and multi-component fluids in confined geometries. Balazs served as the Chair of the Division of Polymer Physics of the APS (2000-2001), Co-Chair of the Spring MRS meeting (2000) and served on the APS Public Policy Committee. In addition, she is a Fellow of the APS.

Before joining Materials Horizons, Anna was a member of the Advisory Board for Soft Matter.

Thuc-Quyen Nguyen is a professor in the Center for Polymers and Organic Solids and Chemistry & Biochemistry Department at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She received her Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2001 under the supervision of Professor Benjamin Schwartz. Her thesis focused on photophysics of conducting polymers using ultrafast spectroscopy.

From 2001 to 2004, she was a research associate in the Department of Chemistry and the Nanocenter at Columbia University working with Professors Louis Brus and Colin Nuckolls on molecular self-assembly, nanoscale characterization, and molecular electronics. She also spent time at IBM Research Center at T. J. Watson working with Richard Martel and Phaedon Avouris. In 2004, she started an assistant professorship at UCSB and was promoted to full professor in 2011.

Her current research interests are structure-function-property relationships in organic semiconductors, electronic properties of conjugated polyelectrolytes, interfaces in optoelectronic devices, charge transport in organic semiconductors and across membranes, device physics, and nanoscale characterization of organic solar cells. Her group has published over 120 peer reviewed papers. Recognition for her research includes the 2005 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, the 2006 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the 2007 Harold Plous Award (one of the UCSB’s two most prestigious faculty honors), the 2008 Camille Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award, the 2009 Alfred Sloan Research Fellows, and the 2010 National Science Foundation American Competitiveness and Innovation Fellows.

Materials Horizons Advisory Board member, Jean-Luc Brédas, is the author of the journal’s first Focus article, Mind the gap! Focus articles are educational pieces, intended to explain or clarify topics relevant to the understanding of materials science. In his article, Professor Brédas seeks to clear up the confusion surrounding the many types of energy gap relevant to organic materials, and calls for a more rigorous use of the appropriate terminology. Here we find out more about the author, and why he chose to write this article for Materials Horizons.

Jean-Luc Brédas is Regents’ Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Institute of Technology. He began his research career at the Université de Namur, Belgium, where he completed a Ph.D. in Theoretical Chemistry. Since then, he has held positions at Université de Mons, Belgium, the University of Arizona, USA, and King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia. He is the author or co-author of over 950 scientific papers and has presented over 500 invited talks at scientific meetings and seminars.

Professor Brédas has been awarded numerous prizes in recognition of his work, including the Triennal Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry, Belgium, (1991), the Francqui Prize (1997), the Descartes Prize of the European Commission (2003) and the Georgia Institute of Technology Outstanding Faculty Research Author Award (2008). In 2013, he received the American Physical Society David Adler Lectureship Award in Materials Physics. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry since 2008.

The research activities of Professor Brédas’ group are focused on the computational characterization and design of novel organic materials of relevance for organic electronics and photonics.

What was the motivation to write your Materials Horizons Focus article?There were two major reasons: The first is the original concept behind these Focus articles, which I believe is unique to Materials Horizons. The second is that many of my colleagues and myself were becoming increasingly frustrated by the lack of rigor surrounding the use of common terminologies in materials research articles, in particular with regard to energy gaps and energy levels in electro-active organic materials. Hence, when Seth Marder came to me with a proposition to write such a Focus article, he met no resistance!

At which upcoming conferences may our readers meet you?In the spring, I’ll participate in SPIE Photonics West in San Francisco, the ACS National Meeting in Dallas, and the MRS Spring Meeting (again in San Francisco).

How do you spend your spare time?Soccer, or should say much more appropriately football, is my main passion besides science. I still try to play as much as I can especially with my students. Also, I very much enjoy tending to the four fish tanks I have at home, with fish (cichlids) mainly from the Central Africa Lakes: Tanganyika and Malawi.

Which profession would you choose if you were not a scientist?This is a tough question because I cannot picture myself doing something else really. The fulfillment that scientific research, teaching students, and making friends all over the world bring, would be in my mind very difficult to match. But to answer the question, maybe I’d like to be in the sports business, for instance as a commentator.

‘The energy gap is a critical material parameter. Here, we illustrate the concepts behind the various flavors of energy gaps relevant for organic materials and call for a more consistent use of appropriate terminologies and procedures.’

Stefan A. F. Bon is an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Warwick, UK. He studied Chemical Engineering at the Technical University of Eindhoven (TUE), the Netherlands (cum laude, 1989-1993). He has a background in the mechanistic and kinetic development of (living) radical polymerizations (1993-2005). Since 2005 he has established himself as an international player in the area of polymer colloids, and continues to innovate in the area of supracolloidal chemistry. Since 2009 he has given more than 70 invited talks. He is an IUPAC fellow, and the current chair of the UK Polymer Colloids Forum (UKPCF) and of the International Polymer Colloids Group (IPCG).

Why did you choose Materials Horizons to publish your exciting work?We chose Materials Horizons for this article as we really liked the vision behind this new Royal Society of Chemistry journal in that it focusses on new conceptual insights in material science, spanning across the breaths of all the more traditional disciplines, such as chemistry and physics. Our paper draws from knowledge on sol-gel synthesis, Pickering stabilisation, emulsion templating, uses heterogeneous catalysis, and blends it with physical concepts and understanding on motion on the microscopic scale. Chemotaxis is common in nature and to demonstrate that our matchstick shaped particles could undergo this directional form of self-propulsion was very exciting. This mash-up of scientific disciplines for our work made Materials Horizons THE journal to publish our work in.

How did you find the Materials Horizons publication process?As can be said for all scientific journals published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, the submission and review process is very professional and fast. I was impressed with the turn around time and the excellent comments of the reviewers made. I also very much value the promotion the Materials Horizons team has done after our paper went live. Thanks very much!

What topics would you like to see covered in future issues of Materials Horizons? Are there any particularly related to Focus articles, which are educational articles, designed to provide the reader with a sense of a concept from an area of materials science?This is a tough question as material science is broad, but in short: “stuff that amazes the reader” I really hope that the journal becomes a platform for scientific discoveries with a conceptual wow-factor. Adding spatial control to self-assembly of molecules or particles, building a synthetic cell which could operate as a chemical production plant, a flexible solar cell with a life-span of years maintaining high conversion efficiencies, etc…
It would be great if Focus articles could report on a topic in a way that it provides an almost synergistic portrait drawn from knowledge of material scientists of different scientific backgrounds.

Tell us more about your researchThe BonLab undertakes research through a combination of polymer chemistry, soft matter/fluid physics, and chemical engineering. We study the chemistry and physics of colloidal systems in which molecular and/or colloidal entities can be assembled into more complex supracolloidal structures. We are interested in the synthesis of particles and macromolecules with a design tailored to trigger and control motility and assembly, the development of methods to (self)-organise colloidal matter, the understanding of the interactions involved between molecular and colloidal building blocks and potential macroscopic substrates. We find it important that our technology can be scaled-up and is of use in a variety of industrial applications ranging from sensors and devices, coatings and adhesives, to food, personal care, agricultural and biological systems. The BonLab is predominantly funded by industry to tackle a variety of problems for applications ranging from food, coatings, concrete and adhesives, to personal care formulations, agricultural formulations, and binders and dispersants.

Prof. Shu-Hong Yu is currently the Head of the Division of Nanomaterials & Chemistry at the Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Science at the Microscale, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), and the Deputy Dean of the School of Chemistry & Materials, USTC. His research interests include bio-inspired synthesis and self-assembly of new nanostructured materials and nanocomposites, and their related properties. A very recent focus involves the scale-up synthesis of high quality ultrathin nanowires and their macroscopic-scale assembly. Find out more about Shu-Hong Yu’s research by visiting his research lab homepage.

Prof. Shu-Hong Yu has authored and co-authored more than 350 refereed journal publications, and 16 invited book chapters. His work has been cited 11,639 times, and has a h-index of 59. He has supervised 37 PhD students to completion at the USTC and currently supervises or co-supervises 25 PhD students.

Professor Shu-Hong Yu is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), and serves as an advisory/editorial board memberof the journals Chemical Science, Materials Horizons, Nano Research, CrystEngComm, Part. Part. Syst. Charact. and Current Nanoscience. His recent awards include the Chem. Soc. Rev. Emerging Investigator Award (2010) and the Roy-Somiya Medal of the International Solvothermal and Hydrothermal Association (ISHA) (2010).

Why did you choose Materials Horizons to publish your exciting work?I chose Materials Horizons for this Communication because this journal is a totally new flagship materials science journal launched by a very experienced publisher. I believe that our results published in this emerging journal will receive more exposure and broad attention in the community.

How did you find the Materials Horizons publication process?The publishing and reviewing process was faster and highly efficient.

What topics would you like to see covered in future issues of Materials Horizons?I think some coverage of advances in synthetic methodologies of functional nanomaterials, self-assembly and processing of nanoscale building blocks and their practical applications in diverse fields.

You may have seen Gordon Wallace’s recent Materials Horizons communication on liquid crystalline dispersions of graphene oxide. (If not, take a look here; it’s free to access!) Here, we profile the author, and ask him about his experience with Materials Horizons.

Professor Gordon Wallace is currently the Executive Research Director at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science and Director of the Intelligent Polymer Research Institute. He previously held an ARC Federation Fellowship and currently holds an ARC Laureate Fellowship. Professor Wallace’s research interests include organic conductors, nanomaterials and electrochemical probe methods of analysis, and the use of these in the development of Intelligent Polymer Systems. A current focus involves the use of these tools and materials in developing bio-communications from the molecular to skeletal domains in order to improve human performance via medical Bionics.

With more than 700 refereed publications, Professor Wallace has attracted some 17,000 citations and has a h-index of 61. He has supervised 77 PhD students to completion at the Intelligent Polymer Research Institute and currently co-supervisors 30 PhD students.

Professor Wallace is an elected Fellow at the Australian Academy of Science, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, the Institute of Physics (UK) and the Royal Australian Chemical Institute. In addition to being named NSW Scientist of the Year in the chemistry category in 2008, Professor Wallace was also appointed to the Korean World Class University System, and received the Royal Australian Chemical Institute HG Smith Prize.

Why did you choose Materials Horizons to publish your exciting work?I like the approach that combines education and digestible insights with the forefront of research. More and more I realise the critical need to communicate advances in knowledge emanating from the research laboratory to a broad cross section of our communities as effectively and efficiently as possible.

How did you find the Materials Horizons publication process?The process was effective and efficient.

What topics would you like to see covered in future issues of Materials Horizons?I think some coverage of advances in BioAFM would be most timely.